Daniel Bingham

@kbal @dangillmor And then on top of that, when you lock certain service types into certain protocols, you cut off evolution.

Imagine if we’d legislated email interoperability by declaring that all “services that implement messaging must implement email”.

You’ve now seriously hampered the evolution of IRC, AIM Chat, MSN Messenger, the various social media messaging services, Slack, Discord, and even localized chats like Stackoverflow’s chat.

@kbal @dangillmor I’m sorry it’s uninteresting, but it’s the crux of the matter. Mapping services to protocols is the hard part. And it’s not just social media. If we’re talking about mandating interoperability among big tech, we’re talking about all tech.

Social media is most at the forefront of people’s minds, but search and email are just as problematic. Email’s already built on an interoperable protocol and it’s *still* monopolized to where big tech dictates who gets to participate.

@kbal @dangillmor So you caught the first issue in your final line.

> I’m thinking of “social media” of course. Other[s…] would require different protocols.

How would you define the set that are required to implement RSS? The set required to implement ActivityPub?

@kbal @dangillmor How would you go about mandating interoperability? As in, in non legal language, how might you frame the law?

@dangillmor I’m fully in favor of breaking them up, but as a developer who has taken multiple runs at non-profit and public interest software startups: Don’t mandate interoperability. You will destroy all competition that way.

The big guys can afford to implement n^n connections to each other’s platforms. Startups can’t. The idea might be that it would lead to the creation of common protocols, but that locks people in to a single implementation.